


Will the Pizza Be Unbroken

by harpers_mirror (SapphireBryony)



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Eiffel just wants his friends to be happy okay?, Gen, Post-Hephaestus, friendship necklace fluff-fest 2k16, past pain and present friendship, slight Eiffera
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-21 00:36:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6031708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SapphireBryony/pseuds/harpers_mirror
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was a man on a mission. A mission of of friendship (and pizza).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Will the Pizza Be Unbroken

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted in four parts on tumblr as "pizza necklace fluff-fest 2k16" ([story inspiration](http://heroictype.tumblr.com/post/139125689792/space-grunge-wwwshopspacetrashcom), [title inspiration](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F1l6xXLSI0))
> 
>  
> 
> [Now with amazing fan art!](http://weirdmageddon-wendy.tumblr.com/post/139983672317/reaching-inside-he-drew-out-a-single-5x7)

Afterwards, Doug Eiffel could never quite recall exactly what had prompted his drunken brain to google “friendship necklaces,” but as soon as the 5-part pizza one appeared on the screen, he ordered it without a second thought.

When it arrived, he eagerly tore open the mailer and fastened the first part around his own neck because hell yeah, a necklace with a slice of pizza on it! The fleeting thought crossed his mind that it was probably even better than dog tags if someone ever had to identify his body.

On that cheery note, he slipped three of the other four necklaces into his pocket, grabbed his coat, and was out the door, a man on a mission of friendship and pizza.

He hit up Hera’s lab first. Upon their arrival back on Earth, she had been put to work troubleshooting space missions from the planet side of things. _Technically_ she was off limits but he and Minkowski had very diplomatically threatened their way in that first day and the guards knew them on sight now.

He got in with little trouble.

“Hey babe! I brought you a present.”

Her optical swung around to face him. “A present? For me?”

“Yup!” He fished one of the necklaces out and held it up in front of her, displaying it alongside the one he himself wore. “See? They fit together. I’ve got ones for Minkowski and Lovelace too, assuming they don’t laugh themselves to death at the idea.” He shrugged, blushing a little. “I just thought it seemed like a nice idea.”

“I think it’s sweet," said Hera sounding genuinely pleased. "Thank you, Officer Eiffel. But how will I wear it? I don’t exactly have a neck.”

Eiffel glanced around the room for a moment, at the many component parts that made up his best girl. “We could hang it around the swivel-y arm thing your camera is on, couldn’t we? I mean, that’s kinda like a neck.”

With Hera’s consent, he clasped the thin silver chain around the camera support. “There you go, darlin’. Looks good on you.” He winked and pulled out his phone to take of picture of the two of them in their matching necklaces, then kissed the side of the camera.

“Gotta run, but I’ll be back soon, okay?”

Hera’s voice was full of electronic laughter as she bade him goodbye.

 

* * *

 

Smiling, Doug hopped into his car to deal with slice number 3 - Minkowski. He knew there was a nearly 100% chance she was going to laugh at him, but making her laugh at his stupid antics was pretty much just an official part of his job description at this point.

He was happy to do it. Since returning to Earth, she laughed so much more freely. And breathed easier, and smiled more, and - well. Doug cut himself off before his train of thought got too mushy.

But it was clear that Earth agreed with Renée Minkowski. _And_ , he thought with a smirk, _getting to spend time with her stupidly attractive husband probably doesn’t hurt either._ He knew _he’d_ be smiling a lot more if he was coming home to Dominik Koudelka every day. That, however, was a line of thought for another time. He was pulling into the lot next to Minkowski’s building and for some reason, it bugged her when he hit on her husband.

He couldn’t imagine why.

Hitting the buzzer next to her name, it occurred to Doug that maybe he should have called first to make sure she was actually here. But luck was on his side and she buzzed him inside. When he got to her door, it was already open, and Renée was hovering in the doorway nervously.

“Eiffel? Is everything okay?” she asked when he got close enough.

“What? Oh, yeah Commander, everything’s peachy.”

“Oh.” She looked askance at him for a moment. “Come...in?” She must have seen the look on his face because she sighed and said, “Sorry Eiffel. Just...you showing up out of the blue, it made me think maybe something had happened. Usually you call or something first. Not that you aren’t welcome here whenever, but...”

The tips of her ears were slowly reddening.

“Oh man, I’m sorry Minkowski. This was just kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing. I didn’t mean to scare you, I didn’t think -”

Minkowski laughed softly, cutting him off, and he looked at her in surprise. “I was just realizing what paranoid loonies we sound like. This is not how normal people react to a surprise visit from their friend.” She was still smiling slightly, but her voice had an edge of bitterness to it that made his heart hurt. Reaching out, he gripped her shoulder.

“Hey, no one ever accused me of being normal _before_ I went into space. It’s not so bad.”

She snorted. “Right, because my greatest aspiration in life is to be more like _you_ , Eiffel.”

He let her shoulder go and took the hit with good humor - she was smiling for real now, and that was what mattered. “You know you love me. Anyway, I brought you something.”

Digging into his pocket, he pulled out the third necklace, but kept it closed in his hand for a moment, feeling suddenly self-conscious. “I mean, it’s kinda dumb. Very dumb, in fact. But I saw a thing and I thought it was kind of neat so...” He thrust the necklace at Minkowski with one hand while pulling out his own with the other. “Here. Hera’s got one too.”

Doug looked away as she took it and looked it over. “They all fit together,” he mumbled. In her silence, he felt the weight of judgement pushing down all around him. This had been a stupid idea, who gives little-kid friendship necklaces to the people you almost _died_ with, what had he been _thinking_ -

“This is the most sweetly weird thing anyone’s ever given me, Eiffel.”

Huh, maybe he’d done good after all. Still slightly uncomfortable, he tried to play it off. “Well, y’know, sweet and weird, that’s my M.O. Commander,” he joked.

“Yeah,” she replied thoughtfully. “It kind of is, Doug.”

He met her eyes again and the sweet smile she gave him brought his own grin back full-force. Impulsively, he pulled her into a hug.

“Glad you like it.”

Later, he would reflect that while he never saw Minkowski actually wear it as a necklace, the little pizza slice charm found its way onto her key ring and stayed there.

 

* * *

  

Slice number four, Eiffel knew, was going to be a bit harder to deliver. After their arrival back on Earth, after the scandal and the trial and the endless questions and re-hashings of pain still far too raw, Isabel Lovelace had headed up the coast to get away from everyone for a bit.

Eiffel didn’t quite understand why - she’d been so extremely isolated for so long he’d assumed she’d want to surround herself with as many people as possible. But instead she’d settled, for the moment anyway, in a little cabin in the woods - and there she stayed. While he and Minkowski saw each other pretty regularly, and they both made a point to visit Hera, he hadn’t seen Lovelace since Christmas, when Minkowski had dragged them both out of hiding for a surprise birthday party for Eiffel.

The drive took just shy of two hours - long enough for Doug to nearly talk himself into turning around several times. Unlike with Minkowski, where his biggest fear had been her laughing at him or thinking the gesture weird, when it came to Lovelace he was more worried about upsetting her. Being back on solid ground and getting some measure of justice for her fallen crew had done a bit to lessen some of her emotional turmoil, but she was still dealing with more trauma than Doug could really fathom. And so he hoped she’d take this gesture in friendship, as it was meant, rather than as a reminder of the worst thing she’d gone through.

He managed to avoid turning around and chickening out until he pulled into the gravel driveway next to her cabin. Steeling himself, he took a deep breath and got out of the car, heading for the front door.

He knocked. Nothing. He knocked again, louder. “Captain Lovelace? Isabel? It’s Eiffel...”

Seeing the curtains at the upstairs window twitch, he stopped calling. She knew he was here now, the ball was in her court.

Nothing happened for long enough that he was considering leaving. He had just started to turn away from the door when he heard the clicks of several locks being disengaged. The door swung open.

“Eiffel? What do you want?”

“Hey Captain! Brought you a present.”

“What? Why? What did you do?”

“I haven’t even _seen_ you recently, what could I possibly have done?” he asked, sounding slightly wounded.

Isabel looked at him askance. “I stopped underestimating your capacity for trouble-making a long time ago, Eiffel.”

He considered this for a moment. “Huh. Fair enough. Anyways, here.” He pulled out the necklace. “I’d give you the whole speech I just gave Minkowski about how this was a weird and probably dumb gift but I’m all out of self-deprecation for the moment.”

She stared at the thing dangling from his outstretched hand for a moment. “Is that - is that a slice of pizza?”

“Yeah! See?” He pulled out his phone and showed her the picture he’d taken earlier that morning of himself and Hera. “Now everyone from the station has one. Or well, you, me, Hera, and Minkowski. So, everyone that _matters_. I dunno, I just thought it was kind of fun and, uh, you know. You guys are important. To - to me. And, well, you can’t blame a guy for wanting to commemorate surviving space hell with the three most badass women on the planet.”

Doug stared searchingly into Lovelace’s blank face, hoping he hadn’t just screwed up and upset her. She was quiet for another long minute - just long enough for him to work himself into a slight panic, in fact - and then she finally spoke.

“You’re a very strange man, Eiffel. Has anyone told you that recently?” Without waiting for an answer, she took the necklace from him and studied it. “There have to be five pieces to this set or otherwise it wouldn’t make a circle. What are you going to do with the last bit?”

He’d been hoping she wouldn’t bring that up. “Oh, uh. I kind of had an idea in mind for it but it’s not ready yet. Permission to hold off answering that question until a later time, Captain?”

She rolled her eyes with a slight smile. “Request granted, Communications.” After a moment’s pause, she seemed to come to some decision and slipped the necklace around her neck. “Thanks.”

Relieved, Doug waved a hand. “Don’t mention it. Glad you - glad you like it, Captain.” He sketched a salute, smiled, and headed for his car.

Lovelace let him go, but that night he got a text from her, which was a first. It read, _“Feel free to give me a call sometime. It gets too quiet here.”_

He did.

 

* * *

 

The last step of his plan, the one that had occurred to him on the long drive up to Isabel’s cabin two weeks earlier, had taken a bit of digging to put together. Fortunately, everything they’d gone through upon their return to Earth meant that Doug had a few contacts able to access all the old records that were all that remained of Goddard Futuristics.

Still, it was pretty much just came down to luck, not only that his contact was able to dig up what he wanted but that there was even anything _to_ find. Doug was a little amazed that any record even existed of the first Hephaestus crew. He’d feared that Cutter would have had it all destroyed and then done something creepy, like roll around naked in the shredded remains.

Shuddering, wondering what it would take to expunge _that_ image from his poor brain, Doug opened the large manila envelope that had been waiting for him when he’d opened his mailbox that afternoon. Inside, he found a summaries of the service records of the five men and women who had served under Captain Isabel Lovelace aboard the first ill-fated Hephaestus mission.

After discarding the dossier for “Selberg, Dr. Elias” - he had no interest in _that_ particular batch of lies, Eiffel spent the next half an hour getting to know what he could about “Fisher, Mace,” “Hui, Kwan,” “Fourier, Victoire,” and his predecessor, “Lambert, Samuel.”

There was depressingly little. He knew he was lucky to have dug up even this much, but still, it was painful seeing the lives of four smart, ambitious, probably wonderful human beings reduced to some biographical data and a few lines of text listing their accomplishments. It made him think about what his piece of paper would have looked like had he met their end, if some quirk of fate hadn’t ordained that Doug Eiffel made it back to Earth alive, when so many others had not.

With a heavy sigh, he pushed back the dark thoughts crowding in around the edges of his mind and turned his attention back to the envelope. Reaching inside, he drew out a single 5x7 photograph that looked like it had seen better days - possibly several months worth of them. It was creased and one corner was torn off, but the people peering out from it were unmistakably Lovelace’s crew, taken before they’d shipped out to the Hephaestus.

Isabel herself was there, surreptitiously throwing up bunny ears behind the head of a slender man with colorless hair and a dour expression who Doug assumed had to be Lambert. Lovelace had talked about him a few times, never more than a few sentences worth, but it had been enough to draw a fond, sad picture of a man who was even more rules-loving than Minkowski.

Staring down at Isabel’s grinning, impish face staring back at him across the years, Eiffel was hit by a wave of sadness, remembering the laughing voice he’d heard in her first recording. He wondered if that woman’s ghost still lurked somewhere inside his friend and if so, what it would take to bring her out of hiding.

Looking at the other figures in the photo didn’t help the sadness abate. Fourier and Hui were standing together, arms around each other’s shoulders and smiling happily. By some stroke of luck, Selberg wasn’t in the picture - Doug wasn’t sure if he’d been the one to take it or if he’d just been off hiding in a lab somewhere at the time, and frankly didn’t care. And process of elimination identified Fisher as the man to their left, standing alone but smiling too, none of them having any idea what awaited them in the darkness.

Doug sat the photo back down on the counter and dragged a hand over his face. Suddenly he was none too sure about this plan. He made himself get out the frame he’d bought and, once finished, he took a picture of the end result and sent it to Minkowski, alongside the caption _“I put this together for Lovelace. Terrible idea y/n?”_

Her response came a few minutes later. _“I say go for it. Can’t promise how she’ll react but your heart is, as usual, in the right place. Good luck, Doug.”_

Reading her response, Doug felt his dark mood dissipate. “Huh, warm fuzzies from the Commander. I must have done good.” He sent off a quick text to Lovelace asking if he could stop by around dinner time, and then shoved his phone into his pocket and then flopped onto the sofa to wait.

 

* * *

  

Walking up to Lovelace’s door, Eiffel reflected that he really needed to start visiting his friends without the intent to deliver Meaningful Presents and just start, like, coming for dinner or something equally less fraught.

This time, she actually opened the door before he got to it, and leaned on the doorjamb, arms crossed and an eyebrow raised.

“So what’s so important that you had to come all the way back out here so soon? Did you get me another present or something?”

Doug grinned sheepishly. “Uh, actually...yeah. Sort of.”

Lovelace stared at him for a moment and then rolled her eyes. “Come on in then, Santa.” She stepped inside and he followed, the smile lingering on his face for a moment before a wave of nerves rose again and washed it away.

Once inside, seated in squashy armchairs in front of the fireplace, Eiffel took a deep breath.

“So Captain - “

“Eiffel, if you’re going to keep showing up on my doorstep with presents like a cat dragging in half-dead birds we can probably drop the titles.”

“Sorry, un, Isabel.” He winced. “Wow, that’s gonna take some getting used to. I still worry that if I call Minkowski ‘Renée’ she’s gonna lock me in the nearest broom closet.” At the sideways look Isabel gave him, he flapped a hand dismissively. “Long story. Anyway. Remember when I was here before and you asked me what I was going to do with the last necklace from the set? And I said I’d tell you later?” She nodded. “Well it’s later and I - I did something.”

Her eyebrows shot upwards at that. “Doug, to be honest, hearing you say the words ‘I did something’ in that tone makes me wonder if I need to go get some tarps and a shovel.”

He snorted. “Nothing quite so action-packed. But, well...here,” he said, thrusting a tissue-paper-wrapped bundle at her. Before she could unwrap it though, he took a chance and placed one hand over hers, stilling their movement.

“But before you open it, I want you to know that I’m not entirely certain this wasn’t a terrible idea. So if you want to throw me out of here on my ass in the next 30 seconds or so, I totally get it. Minkowski wasn’t sure either but she told me to go for it and...” Realizing he was babbling, Doug shut up and moved his hand away, backing slightly out of her space.

Lovelace looked full-on apprehensive now, and he noticed her hands were trembling slightly. Already beginning the mental flagellation routine, he looked away as he heard the tissue paper rustle.

A short gasp and a long silence followed.

Eiffel finally chanced a look over at her to see her tracing a trembling finger over the faces smiling from behind the glass. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the last necklace.

“I thought...” He trailed off as he gently deposited the necklace on the picture, the chain coiling to cover the little slice of pizza. Clearing his throat, he tried again. “I thought they could be the last piece. I mean, I never knew your crew but...” He shrugged, even though he knew she wasn’t looking at him. “It felt like the right thing to do. They’re part of the club, after all. They...they braved the darkness too.”

Lovelace was still silently staring at the picture, lower lip trembling. Her eyes were suspiciously bright in the firelight but Doug knew she didn’t want to cry in front of him. The moment dragged on and he clenched his hands into fists, nails digging into his palms as he fought the urge to flee.

Finally, she spoke. 

“Where...” Her voice cracked, and she tried again. “How did you find this? I thought that they’d destroyed _everything_.”

Smiling faintly, Doug replied, “Hey, I’ve got connections in unexpected places. You’d be surprised what I can get my hands on.”

Luckily, the joke had its intended effect and Lovelace laughed, a slightly watery chuckle. She hastily brushed a hand over her eyes and then stared back down at the picture.

He took a chance. “So, was this okay? I wasn’t sure about springing it on you like that but I wasn’t sure how to segue into that without making it a whole big hairy deal, and - “

He was cut off mid-sentence by a quick, fierce hug.

“Thanks,” she whispered in his ear before retreating to her chair.

“No problem, Cap - Isabel. It was my pleasure. And hey - now the pizza is complete. No missing pieces.”

“No,” she agreed, but her eyes were sad. “No one’s left out now.”

He stayed for a while longer but eventually made his excuses and left. Once back in his car, he pulled out his phone to find a text from Minkowski. _“How’d it go? She hurt you?”_

Smiling slightly, he typed back, _“Nah, all’s well. Operation Pizza and Friendship is complete.”_

Dropping the phone on the passenger seat, Doug Eiffel started his car, backed down the long driveway, and drove off into the night, feeling for once that he’d done something right.

 


End file.
